It is unbelievable that in America, in the twentieth century, a man has been sentenced by the court because it is suspected that he is a rapist, to fifty years in jail — or castration. The great American society, the great democracy! And just see the alternative they are giving him. Fifty years of jail; he must be at least thirty, I assume fifty years of jail means he will die in jail. It is a life-long sentence. And even if he survives and comes out after fifty years imprisonment, what hope can he have? He will be eighty years old, thrown into a world which has become absolutely unknown to him in fifty years.
The people he had known would have disappeared. The people that will be there will not be able to understand him, nor will he be able to understand them; there will be such a gap. He will die on some street as a beggar. There is no point….
The alternative is castration, that his sexual organs should be cut off.
Even if it were certain that he did commit a rape — and it is not. Rape is one of the problems which is not so easy to decide and judge; there are so many complexities. But first, just for argument's sake, let us accept that it is certain that he committed the rape. The question arises: why did he have to go to such lengths to fulfill such a simple desire? Sex is such a simple phenomenon. There is no lack of men or women, there is no necessity for anybody to rape.
But the way the society has been against sex, they have made it a serious problem. It should be simple playfulness — and that's exactly what it is. Two people are playing tennis, there is no problem. Nobody ever hears that somebody raped… there is no question of raping in tennis. You can play; there is no need to rape. When two people are playing tennis they are using their bodies, their minds. What are they doing when they are making love? — it is just there is not a net in between. And all the contraceptives are nothing but the net! The contraceptives make it really a game, with the net.
The net was missing. God did not supply it to Adam and Eve. Perhaps out of anger He simply kept the net to Himself; otherwise, in throwing those two poor people out of the garden of Eden He should at least have given them all the provisions for life.
The society goes on making you very serious about sex. It goes on making you repress your energies. There is a limit to repression; after that limit, the energy takes over Whenever a man commits rape, he is not in his senses, for the simple reason that the rape cannot help him to solve his problem. The rape cannot give him the joy that his whole physiology is asking for. Rape cannot give him the warmth, the love, the receptivity that he needs. It is simply not the answer to his need.
But you have left no other ways. You have forced the man into such a condition that he simply explodes like a volcano.
Seeing a woman in a lonely spot he forgets the consequences. He forgets hell, God, THE BIBLE, church, court, constitution; he forgets everything. He is not in his real self, he is not himself; he becomes almost like an animal.
OSHO
